This is China! BLOG

Book Review: A China Hand’s Story - Something to Crow About

Paul French doesn’t drink coffee. He figures it’s a waste of time. French is author of Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai . “We don’t really drink coffee, do we?” the tall British author continued, “We smell it.” So, in other words, why bother? Though we were at a fashionable corporate cafe in Shanghai near the historic Bund district, and as much as I wanted to “smell” the espresso, I myself also chose against drinking a coffee. “You Americans like drinking things with funny names – like ‘smoothies.’ They’ve got smoothies here.” He elongated the “ooo” so my American-English attuned ear would more clearly understand what he was saying. We both ordered smoothies and sipped them at a low table seated in chairs from an Apple iPod catalog. It seemed impossible for me to get comfortable on the small stools; I imagined it was even more difficult for French, whose legs always seemed to wind the wrong way from the minimalist furniture.

In reading his Carl Crow book, it’s easy to see why French eschews anything that would seem to be a time drain. Carl Crow is one of the most detailed biographies and histories of China I’ve ever read. I asked him, “How did you manage to gather and write so much detail? Well,” he told me once, “I don’t play silly games like golf and I don’t watch TV; huge waste of time, TV.”

Carl Crow was a prolific author and successful businessman based in Shanghai for 35 years, during some of the most tumultuous scenes in Chinese history. Born in 1883, Crow made landfall in Shanghai in 1911, with the fall of the Qing Dynasty. With the exception of a couple years spent back in the States, he would make China his home until the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937 would force him back to America, with little more to show for his twenty-five years than a suitcase of clothes.

Crow was author of the famous book 400 Million Customers, about the consumer habits of the Chinese people. Part cultural odyssey, part business book in the modern vein, 400 Million Customers was given to American troops that made landfall in China at the end of World War II. “Crow’s book is still the best book about China there is,” French said matter-of-factly. Crow also wrote other books: an automobile guide in the AAA-mold for driving through 1920s China; a book about Philippine culture and geography; The Great American Consumer; Japan’s Dream of World Empire; and the popular The Chinese Are Like That, another cultural odyssey.

Crow was also founder and manager of a highly successful and lucrative advertising business based in Shanghai. Indeed, it was Crow that promoted the image of the modern, cosmopolitan Shanghai woman through the posters and calendars that proliferated through the day. He worked for the American government as an intelligence agent, writing reports on Japanese movements and strategy during World War II. He died of cancer just months before the Japanese surrender at the end of the War, in 1945.

I asked French about the proliferation of China books in publishing channels today. He answered, “The number of books that are on the market now about China are actually only about half of what was on the market during Crow’s time, [in the 1920’s and 1930’s]. Interest about China at the time was huge. And China’s importance in the world back then was even greater than it is now. Now, China is just an economic story. Back then, it was the focal point of all the major powers; what happened in China would affect the rest of the world.”

Long after the interview, I thought about what French said about China during that chaotic period in the early 1900s. Eventually, I preferred to think what happened during Crow’s time was really just the preface to a new era in China. Now, we’re just getting to the cruxt of the story.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee.